Solar System bodies such as planets, meteorites and comets are all created from small grains during the protoplanetary disk phase. The chemical composition of all these objects is intrinsically related to the chemistry of gas and grains in the parent disk. In the first part of the lecture we will explore the evidence we have to understand grain growth in disks. In the second part of the lecture we will go through the chemistry of disks and how thermodynamics can help us to understand the formation of our Solar System and the bulk composition of exoplanets orbiting stars different from our Sun.

The lecture will be presented by Catarina Ubach and Francesco Pignatale, 3rd year PhD students from Swinburne University Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing (CAS) in room ATC101.

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In The Spotlight

VSSEC is proud to announce that Jessica Orr, of the University of Queensland, is the winner of the 2015/16 Space Prize. She is both the recipient of the Engineering Category prize and the overall prize.